Contesting the Public Realm: Struggles over Public Space in Los Angeles

Abstract

This article, in response to architectural “narratives of loss” lamenting the disappearance of public space, argues that urban residents are constantly remaking public space and redefining the public sphere through their lived experience. Following Nancy Fraser, this article questions the insistence on a unified public, the desire for fixed categories, and the rigid concepts of public and private space that characterize the bourgeois public sphere and proposes contestation, competing “counter-publics,” and the blurring of private and public as equally significant aspects of the public sphere. In Los Angeles, the struggles of two “counter-publics,” street vendors and the homeless, over use of the streets and public places reveal the emergence of another discourse of public space, suggesting new forms of “insurgent citizenship” and offering new political arenas.